Tony Rutkowski begins the debate on October 20, 1994 with a simple statement in response to a
summary of the discussion at the ANSI sponsored Information Infrastructure
Standards Panel (IISP) Meeting.

Somehow most of this overview seems curiously to not recognize
the existence of today's largest and fastest growing open global
computer networking infrastructure - namely the Internet and
Enterprise Internets.

Tony continued to press his point, and on November 24th asked Chick Hayden of ANSI to
clarify a phrase from the organizational plan for the IISP that specified
that the steering committee would include member companies, government
representatives, and ``12 standards developing and other organizations.''
His note suggested that the ANSI definition tended to favor the more
traditionally oriented SDO's and that the NII effort should be more broad
and inclusive.

On November 30th, the debate was joined when Steve Oksala responded.
Steve took an analytic approach to the issues and began by articulating the
top down structure that is deduced by beginning with the international
organizations.

``International Standards Organizations'' are those generally recognized
by both the private and public sectors as the fora for establishing formal
international standards. For the IT field, this means the ITU . . . the ISO and
IEC. . . .[R]epresentation is on a national basis; that is, countries have
delegates - not companies, or individuals, or any other type of entity.

The note continues with a structure that falls out of this starting
position -- the international forum assumes national organizations which
oversee and sanction standards developers in given sectors; the national
organizations are then responsible for moving these
standards up to the international arena. In the position statement, an
important distinction is made about the role of the standards bodies in
developing and approving standards.

The structure is set up, and always has been, to deal with the
latter[approval]. At the real technical level[development] most
of the organizations allow some level of individual expert unbound
by organizational commitments. It's only at the voting stage[approval]
that structure really counts. ...[T]he national body representation
is a useful methodology [because] ...it keeps the number of
participants in the approval process within reasonable bounds....
[and] it is consistent with the structure of governments who have a
significant stake in the results.

Given the need for a national body form of representation, Oksala goes on
to conclude that self-declaration of SDO's would be less than desirable,
and that the ANSI role of recognizing/accrediting organizations makes
sense. In conclusion, he acknowledges that there are still outstanding
issues to be addressed in this framework:

We have not [settled] how to deal with . . . organizations which do
develop consensus standards and who do have a non-trivial international
participation base. My suggestion would be that such organizations get
accreditation in a national system and utilize it and the international
system to good effect.

The next entry in the exchange took little more than 3 hours to emerge.
Tony Rutkowski's response basically suggested that he could not buy into
the top down structure that Oksala had put forward. In fact, the response
dealt very little with the issues of structure and approval (other than
market acceptance) of standards.

The traditional standardization architecture ``de facto'' is not the real
standardization architecture anymore. There is a new standards universe of
organizations that has been created where most of the real standards today
are developed -- with a number of threads linking the two universes. And
there are people on both sides trying to bring harmony and cooperation
between the two.

Rutkowski continues with some criticism of the nature of the large
bureaucracies which have developed at the international level and opts to
focus on marketplace and ``industry constellations'' as the appropriate venues
for deciding which standards to use.

Internet Standards [are] developed by a very different process . . . which
also promotes an exceptionally open development process that brings highly
innovative and productive individuals and groups into the development
stream. The IETF motto that it ``doesn't recognize Kings - only running
code'' describes the culture. As a result, its standards have captured
better than 99 percent of the marketplace and lead the entire Global
Information Infrastructure revolution occurring today. There are other
comparable groups that have been created over the past few years that have
also been highly successful.

The next day, December 1, 1994 Dan Bart of the Telecommunications
Industries Association (TIA) entered the debate. Basically,
he sided with Oksala noting:

The structured framework, the open
participation, the due process provisions,
and the IPR [Intellectual Property Rights] policies are all things that support good Standards.

He goes on to address two issues. First, the claim that the new developers
move more quickly, and second, the notion that traditional SDO's can't speed
their process.

. . . Those bodies or groups who claim to develop technical requirements
faster often only achieve that goal by changing the consensus threshold to
something like ``a 2/3 vote will get it through.'' If 1/3 of a group still
doesn't like it, I don't believe you have a well-thought out, technically
sound proposal.

and

TIA's fiber optics Committees developed many ANSI Standards at a time of
rapidly changing technology and revisited those standards as frequently as
every 18 months. If warranted, they were revised. We are now reviewing
them at 30 month intervals. Mature ANSI standards are looked at every 60
months. . . . I have listened to presentations from participants of forums
who claim Standards take too long and then look at their timeline for
development and don't see much difference from TIA's timelines.

Tony Rutkowski responded the next day to a point made by Dan Bart
about the variety of different standards being developed, Rutkowski observed:

There has been a kind of implicit assumption that any kind of technology in
every marketplace can have the same kinds of standards developed by the same
kinds of processes. . . . It's struck me that TIA over the years has been
particularly effective in developing standards because it's been very pragmatic
about identifying those technologies and applications where it can play a role
- and those where it cannot.

On December 19th, Steve Oksala made some additional comments on what we will
consider the end of the opening statements. He divides his comments into two
parts. A first section deals with the IISP and while Steve presents a careful,
thorough, and balanced view of the matters under discussion, it is perhaps
simplest to summarize his remarks with a very brief quote.

. . . [T]he ISOC (perhaps I really mean IETF) is an organization equivalent to
X3, T1, IEEE, EIA, and other standards developing organizations - and the IISP
is a place for them to meet and conduct liaison. I would therefore like to
see the Internet folks as active participants at IISP, since they are every
bit as much a standards organization in terms of ``product'' as anyone.

The second part of his comments addressed standardization more generally. He
points out the similarities, and some of the differences, among the various
groups that develop standards. He returns to the leitmotif of a two phase
process -- development and approval -- and states:

This first phase is followed by a second phase where a much smaller group
provides an approval process, making sure that consensus has really been met
and the technical output is consistent with objectives. The way in which this
smaller group is selected varies widely across organizations; sometimes its
members are elected, sometimes appointed, and in others anyone willing to pay
the fee can join. But almost all the groups have this two-level process.

Oksala goes on to try to identify the issue which causes contention. He
rejects the notion that the US process he has identified is too ``top down.''
He suggests that the real issue may be the underlying standardization models,
which he refers to as:

(A) the Competitive Market, and (B) the Coordinated Market, the latter being
one way to characterize the ANSI/ISO process. In the Competitive Market
model, standards organizations (and here I include consortia, trade
associations, or anyone else who develops standards) are encouraged to compete
to produce the best product; the market will determine which is successful. In
many ways this resembles a normal competitive market, except that the
competitors are groups of companies rather than individual ones.

He suggests that:

The Coordinated Market model exists because it provides value, and that
value will continue to exist. It is based on a premise . . . that
``standardization is the agreement to eliminate low value product
differentiation.'' In this model, multiple (competitive) standards are
indicative of a failure in the process if they really have no
differentiation.

Oksala makes a number of points about how the current structure facilitates and
supports this coordinated market before turning his attention back to the
question of the implications for international standardization. He concludes
that he still sees a number of reasons why the concept of a national body makes
sense. These include:

1. . . . The concept of a ``national body'' provides a mechanism for these
organizations [those that might not be able to afford the costs of direct
participation] to participate in the decision making process in a more
geographically local, if less direct, way.

2. Governments are national in interests, so their participation must be in
that context. National bodies provide them a ``natural'' mechanism.

3. Some nominally technical issues are in fact national issues, because they
impact national public sector or private sector interests. . . .

He concludes by suggesting that while technical contributions might be made by
nations, corporations, or individuals, the approval process should operate in a
much more formal way. He goes on to state:

I am not at all disturbed by the notion of an oligopoly. In fact I would say
that the fewer top level organizations the better, because that's how we can
reduce duplication and expense.